Melancholy and Hüzün in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul

Banu Helvacioglu

Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Volume46, Number 2, June 2013, pp. 163-178 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/mos.2013.0019

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Melancholy and Hüzünin Orhan Pamuk’s

Istanbul

BANU HELVACIOGLU

I stanbul: Memories of a City is a tightly woven text in which Orhan Pamuk narrates

three stories: how he decided to become a writer, how he positions himself in rela-

tion to Turkish melancholic writers, and how he responds to the prevalent melan-

cholic perception of Istanbul’s historical and cultural status as a fallen city and to his

memories of it. The text follows three intertwined temporalities. First, Pamuk uses

historical chronology of particular episodes in his life, in his family’s life, and in

Turkey’s history; the book ends in the mid-1970s, when he is in his early twenties.

Second, tapping into the reservoir of Pamuk’s memory, the text flows in the temporal

dynamic of selective/voluntary remembrance. On one hand, then, the narration

defies any historical analysis, but on the other, it carries the trademark of Baudelaire’s

modern aesthetic tradition (84, 203; see also Baudelaire’s Selected Writings and Paris

Spleen) and the critical analysis of Walter Benjamin’s memory (216, 232; see also

This essay examines melancholy/hüzün in three overlapping contexts: as a historical condition of modernity, in

aesthetic production, and as a cultural condition. In Pamuk’s writing, melancholizing becomes a creative device

to explore European and Islamic influences on historical and aesthetic connotations of hüzün that the city holds

in its essence.

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)164

Illuminations and Charles Baudelaire). Third, he maintains that temporality on land

and temporality at sea follow different moods, evident in specific scenes of the

Bosphorus—“Hymn to Smoke” (257) and “The Ship on the Golden Horn” (314). The

two contrasting moods keep each other company: “if the city speaks of defeat,

destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleas-

ure and happiness” (41). Similarly, in certain locations, joyful moments on land are

accompanied by deep sorrow. Perhaps because of the finely tuned construction of

temporalities, Pamuk himself appears almost as a skillfully developed character in a

novel, and indeed, the writing reflects his selective, playfully tailored autobiography

(see Other Colours 361, 366).

To address a question Pamuk raises, “Why have I devoted so much energy to con-

vey to the reader the melancholy I feel in the city where I’ve spent my entire life?” (209),

this inquiry suggests that Pamuk’s conceptualization of melancholy/hüzün is embed-

ded in the creative tension between the personal and the social and the historical and

the atemporal.1 My objective is twofold: to explore how Pamuk in Istanbul stands as a

local, European, and Westernizer (his term for one who is pro-modernization) on one

hand, and as a wanderer in a fictitious, fantastic location on the other; and how these

constantly varying viewpoints help him transform the personal, historical, cultural,

and psychological attributes of melancholy from grief, loss, defeat, and resignation

into instants that he calls “delicious melancholy” (320), moments of rapture “where

melancholy mixes with joy” (61), and timeless, spaceless moments in one’s life that

defy any representation.2 Similar to Burton’s technique, which Cowan (242) and

Flatley (160) refer to as “melancholizing,” Pamuk yields to the depressive mood of

melancholy/hüzün, but at the same time, by contemplating his mood in an aesthetic

and historical context, he transforms collectively experienced resignation into a cre-

ative endeavour to understand the specific historicity and spatiality of Istanbul. This

understanding makes it possible to explore how melancholy in aesthetic production

transverses with melancholy as a historical condition of modernity and with melan-

choly as a cultural condition.3

T o begin with the specifics of the text, Pamuk presents himself as a resident of

Istanbul, an Istanbullu.4 The word Istanbullu retains its intrinsic quality in the

book’s English translation such that outsiders, including citizens of other cities in

Turkey, gain a convincing picture of what it means to hate oneself in general and

Istanbul in particular (286-93). As Pamuk also offers observations such as identifying

the humming sound that emanated from the engines of Kocataş, a certain ferry (319),

the term Istanbullu denotes an intense relationship with the awkward soul of the city.

Banu Helvacıoglu 165

In this context, Istanbul’s collective hüzün is heightened by Pamuk’s sensibility. He

presents Istanbul’s history, as narrated by European and Turkish writers, painters, and

photographers, whereby the roots of “European” melancholy are transformed into

hüzün, the distinguishing attribute of Istanbul.

In Pamuk’s narration, although there is an assumed difference between melan-

choly and hüzün, the difference remains unclear. In the Turkish original, the opening

line by Ahmet Rasim reads: “The beauty of a landscape resides in its hüzün”; the

English version directly translates hüzün as melancholy. Initially, Pamuk seems unde-

cided about these words: “We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or per-

haps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is

communal rather than private” (79). At times, in describing Istanbul’s distinguishing

attribute, he refers to melancholy and hüzün: “I’ve spent my life either battling with

this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own” (6). “So it was that I

finally came to relax and accept the hüzün that gives Istanbul its grave beauty, the

beauty that is its fate” (318).

The tension between the personal melancholy and the collective nature of hüzün

is heightened by the context of his carefully tailored position of being a local, but also

a European/Westerner, who appreciates the “sublime beauty” of the city. At a personal

level, readers get a sense of Pamuk’s aesthetic grounding not only as a writer, but also

as an amateur photographer and painter. Although his literary influences are varied

and too many to name, he cites Melling’s (1763-1831) and Utrillo’s (1883-1955)

painting styles as notable influences on his youthful awakening to the perspectives

Istanbul offers. According to Pamuk, Melling “saw the city like an Istanbullu, but

painted it like a clear-eyed Westerner” (67). On the other hand, in narrating his youth-

ful relationship with Melling and Utrillo’s paintings, Pamuk also touches on one of

the select wounds of aesthetic pursuit in Turkey: how to produce original work with-

out imitating the European arts.5 Pamuk’s response to this national preoccupation

was twofold. He yielded to “that deepening melancholy [. . .] the almost-but-not-quite

shameful truth that [. . .] I’d imitated [Utrillo’s] style, I’d imitated (though without

ever using that word) an artist with his own unique vision and style of painting”

(244). At the same time, as he contemplates the complex ways in which European

influences affected Turkish authors (101), he speaks of varying forms of loss and grief

as the defining character of modern Turkish literature.

A t this point I should address the intersection between melancholy in modernity

and melancholy in modern Turkish literature. Quoting Baudelaire, that “We are all

of us celebrating some funeral,” Flatley (28) argues that “one of the central problems

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)166

of modernity is the attempt to grapple with” losses that cannot be mourned: from

being “haunted by the dead,” guided by “a sense of being lost, of being left out of the

human community in general” to Fanon’s terms of experiencing his body “sprawled

out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning,” modernity offers a rich repertoire for

melancholia (30-31, emph. Flatley’s).6

At a historical level, the melancholic formation of Turkish literature intersects

with particular episodes of loss and grief in modernity. However, in Pamuk’s own

writing career, as well as in the works of the Turkish writers he analyzes, we come

across the peculiar twist of modernity. As Pamuk’s mother posed the problem to him,

“Art, painting, creativity [and writing for that matter] [. . .] were things only

Europeans had the right to take seriously, not we who lived in Istanbul in the second

half of the twentieth century in a culture that had fallen into poverty, lost its strength,

its will and appetite” (323). Standing at the threshold of being a European and an

Istanbullu, Pamuk grapples simultaneously with the historical condition of melan-

choly in Turkish modernity and the peculiarly Turkish reception of art and aesthetics

from within the inferiority complex of a defeated culture.

From a historical point of view, Istanbul’s hüzün is intrinsically tied to the grad-

ual decline of the Ottoman Empire from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth

centuries. After the English publication of Istanbul appeared, Pamuk clarified his

stance: “I am not mourning the Ottoman Empire. I am a Westernizer” (Colours 369).

From this perspective, the underlying current of hüzün is not grief resulting from the

loss of the Ottoman Empire as an object of love (using Freud’s terms of loss in melan-

cholia), but grief resulting from the historical losses that resulted from the

Westernization and modernization efforts of the twentieth century.

At a historical level, the concept of loss in Istanbul’s hüzün can be contextualized

in terms of four developments. First, the desire to Westernize and modernize was pur-

sued concomitantly with a systematic attempt to suppress “all the bitter memories of

the fallen [Ottoman] empire” (27). While the city was still host to Ottoman architec-

ture, fountains, mosques, and monuments, “Westward-looking Istanbul had begun to

reject, suppress, deride and suspect anything to do with the Ottoman past” (142).

Second, the Western republican mindset “reduced religion to a strange and sometimes

amusing set of rules on which the lower classes depended” (164). These two factors

intensified the “spiritual void” among the Westward-looking population. Third, the

“diminished lives” of “the Westernised rich of the last Ottoman generation” were due

to their failure and reluctance to invest in capitalist business ventures (174).

In order to convey this all-pervasive nature of loss in Istanbul’s hüzün, Pamuk

poses a pertinent question: “But if the melancholy flows from loss and poverty, then

Banu Helvacıoglu 167

why do the city’s rich embrace it too? Perhaps it is because they are rich by chance. It

may also be because they have created nothing brilliant of their own to rival the

Western civilization they hope to imitate” (323).7 In this particular context, the loss

that resulted from Westernization and modernization efforts denotes the question-

able origins of both the bourgeois culture and the financial, historical, scholarly, and

artistic infrastructure that produced a “Western, modern” outlook of city life. Fourth,

as a result of the rise of Turkish nationalism in the mid-1950s, non-Muslim

Istanbullus were forced to leave the city. Pamuk refers to this transformation as the

“Turkification of Constantinople” (155-59). The grief of the Armenians, Greeks, and

Jews who left Istanbul is a reminder of the limitation of historical analysis in explain-

ing the unspoken, forbidden ache that resulted from the political vacuuming of the

city. At the threshold of the historical and atemporal, Pamuk notes both the ordinary:

“The barbers [. . .] complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis”

(84), and the ordinarily forgotten: “For that entire night, every non-Muslim who

dared walk the streets of the city risked being lynched” (158). As Nichanian aptly puts

it, when it comes to the ordinarily forgotten, “we are still in the claws of the execu-

tioner” (Kazanjian and Nichanian 127).8

To address how historical episodes of loss transverse with melancholy in aes-

thetic production, an analysis of Turkish melancholic writers deserves more care than

this inquiry offers. Suffice it to note that the writers included in Pamuk’s narration

experience a wounded association with writing while being in the shadows of

European creativity. In this context, Istanbul the city becomes their muse as well as a

social/spatial centre of self-estrangement from the historical loss. Four of the writers

he analyzes—Yahya Kemal, Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Abdülhak Şinasi, and Ahmet Hamdi

Tanpınar—witnessed the fall of the Ottoman Empire in their youth. According to

Pamuk, their works mark the arrival of a poetics about the beauty lost with the era-

sure and suppression of the Ottoman past. Their writing tried to embrace the ration-

alism of Montaigne, the emotional solitude of Thoreau, and the communal sense of

hüzün. In order to highlight the meticulous attention Pamuk pays to the complexities

of each writer’s perception of his reality in a fin de siècle mood, it is important to also

acknowledge author Ahmet Rasim’s survival technique.

In Pamuk’s narration, these authors were in search of an authentic voice in the

midst of the “decline and the fall of the great empire into which they were born”

(101), and their works can be read as self-survival kits. Rasim “confined himself to the

present: Istanbul was an amusing place to live, and that was all there was to it” (123).

A student of Rasim, Koçu “gave his greatest attention to the strange and terrifying

details of [. . .] the methods of Istanbul’s torturers and executioners” (139). In one

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)168

instance, Pamuk draws the reader’s attention to how Koçu resembles “the ‘powerless histo-

rian’ in Nietzsche’s essay ‘On the Uses and Abuses of History’—honing in on historic

details to change the history of his city into the history of himself” (151). From Pamuk’s

exploration of Şinasi, the following is notably melancholic: “All civilizations are transitory

as the people now are in cemeteries. And just as we must die, so too must we accept that

there is no return to a civilization whose time has come and gone” (qtd. in Istanbul 102).

The remaining two authors—Kemal and Tanpınar—are regarded as influential

forces of Turkish literature. Both “had a political agenda” in their patriotic way of enun-

ciating the melancholic beauty of Istanbul’s hüzün. Both had an uneasy relationship

with Western accounts of Istanbul. They read André Gide even though his deplorable

accounts of Istanbul wounded their patriotic pride (211).9 In terms of transforming a

communal melancholy into his own, Pamuk’s method is closer to Tanpınar’s than

Kemal’s. According to Pamuk, following André Gide’s degrading account in La marche

Turque, Kemal and other intellectuals “hid their injury like a guilty secret and grieved in

private” (213). Tanpınar, on the other hand, submitted “to the conditions imposed [. . .]

by history and society” (95) and transformed the melancholy he discovered in Nerval

and Gautier’s observations into an indigenous hüzün (223).

I n Pamuk’s work, the personal melancholy of the writer is fused with another trans-

formative creative process—that is, of producing a unique understanding of the

European and Islamic roots of melancholy/hüzün. However, as Pamuk’s creative writ-

ing is free from any theoretical and conceptual categorization, it is almost impossible

to identify clearly the European and Islamic roots of melancholy and thus difficult to

move beyond his undecipherable claims and demarcate the conceptual boundaries of

melancholy/hüzün as a cultural condition. From a literary perspective, Pamuk’s use of

the term Istanbullu (which is not confined to Turkish melancholic writers and

denotes a particular perspective found in Melling’s paintings and in Gautier’s

Constantinople) is only one reflection of his personal view that melancholy is neither

European nor non-European per se. Gautier made a deep impact on Tanpınar’s

vocabulary and painterly vision to the city lights (202-10). Pamuk sees Gautier as an

Istanbullu, which shapes his own memories and aesthetic vision of his city. Pamuk

states that in addition to noting the usual observations of a Western traveller, Gautier

“knew how to put views into words [. . .] also had the sort of eye that could find

melancholic beauty amid dirt and disorder” (205): “Every time I read about the

unpainted, darkened, dilapidated wooden houses, the broken down fountains, the

neglected türbes with their fallen-in roofs and all the other things [Gautier and his

French guide] observed during their walks, I am amazed that these places I saw while

Banu Helvacıoglu 169

driving in my father’s car a hundred years later were unchanged, except for the cob-

blestones” (205-06).

Regarding Western travellers and observers, on one hand Pamuk stays a critical

distance from both Nerval (199) and Flaubert’s Orientalist views of the city (201), but

on the other hand, he puts the creative tension at the forefront of his own stance: “For

people like me, Istanbullus with one foot in this culture and one in the other, the

‘Western traveller’ is often not a real person—he can be my own creation, my fantasy

and even my own reflection [. . .] So whenever I sense the absence of Western eyes, I

become my own Westerner” (260).

The calculated ambiguity of European and Istanbullus’ aesthetic visions and the

view of the Western traveller as a phantom start disintegrating when Pamuk engages

in an analysis of melancholy as a cultural condition. In this context, he uses a dubious

phrase—“the European roots of melancholy”—to refer to Nerval and Gautier’s obser-

vations about Istanbul. Pamuk notes the absence of the East in Nerval’s poem “The

Black Sun of Melancholy.” According to Pamuk, during his stay in Istanbul, Nerval paid

attention “to things that helped him forget” his own melancholy (199). Yet, his Voyage

en Orient influenced Kemal and Tanpınar’s views on the beauty and poverty of their

city. In Pamuk’s opinion, “the inventions, which reveal much about Nerval’s deep pow-

ers of imagery but little of Istanbul, provide a frame in the manner of Scheherazade”

in 1001 Nights (201). Since both Nerval and Gautier had a decisive influence on

Turkish literature at the turn of the last century, and since Pamuk concedes that his cul-

tural stance is embedded in both the European aesthetic tradition and in Istanbul’s his-

tory, the dubious term “European roots” matters not so much as an assumed necessity

for reconciling Western and non-Western visions, but rather as a spatially specific cul-

tural understanding of the melancholy Istanbul holds in its essence.

To enunciate the cultural/spatial specificity of Istanbul’s melancholy, Pamuk

relies on three questionable claims: first, that individual melancholy is primarily a

European condition; second, that tristesse is a collective condition as well as the expe-

rience of the guilt-ridden Western traveller; and, third, that hüzün is a distinct senti-

mentality of Islamic culture. Regarding the former, Pamuk intimates that “there is a

great metaphysical distance between hüzün and the melancholy of Robert Burton’s

solitary individual” (89). Since he offers no specific reference to the three volumes of

Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, this difference remains unsubstantiated. Despite

the stated difference, Pamuk implies a similarity between Burton’s “sweet melan-

choly” (82) and Istanbul’s hüzün experienced by “choice” (93). Pamuk’s hasty refer-

ence to “Burton’s solitary individual” has notable limitations in locating the cultural

boundaries of “European” melancholy and the particularity of Istanbul’s hüzün.

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)170

From the point of view of Burton’s own personal collection of books and his fas-

cination with astrology, precise data, and Latin, The Anatomy “is a monument to and

expression of the solitary and endless pleasures of reading, searching, and comparing”

(O’Connell 29). It is in this context that melancholy can be construed as solitary and

sweet. At the same time, however, like Pamuk’s book, Burton’s seminal work on

melancholy “poses us an immediate problem of definition” (34). In the first volume,

Burton describes melancholy not only as a mental disease, but also as a punishment

sent from God and a form of madness affecting philosophers, kingdoms, and politi-

cal bodies. In the second volume, he offers comprehensive therapeutic remedies

including talking, citations from Scripture, moral recognition and control, a moder-

ate diet, and “study” as a diversion from self-absorption. In the third volume, he

explains the relationship between love as both a cure and a symptom of melancholy

and despair in religious melancholy as metonyms of the human condition.

If we put aside Pamuk’s claim of metaphysical differences, there is still the question

of historical interpretation. Among different explorations of Burton’s work, it is signif-

icant to note Ruth Fox’s analysis that Burton’s book “portrays as fully as possible the dis-

ordered state of humanity” (O’Connell 36). Seen from this point of view, Burton’s

conception of melancholy as a psychological and physiological disease of the solitary

individual is at the same time a specific condition that affected all parts of social, moral,

and political life in Europe in the seventeenth century. From a late-Renaissance point of

view, melancholy is a universal folly affecting humanity. In Burton’s words: “Thou shall

soon perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy dotes” (I: 38-39). As

O’Connell remarks, the melancholic disorder in Burton’s analysis concerns “the disor-

der in the mind of the culture as it confronts its illness” (46).

To complement this historical reading of Burton’s Anatomy as a representative of

Renaissance humanist perspective, situated within the literature of the entire history

of melancholy since Aristotle,10 Burton’s work is also viewed as a timeless metaphor

for contemplative human nature and specifically for containing a literary device to

enable creative transformation. In this respect, melancholy is regarded not so much

as a mental spiritual disease or, as in Aristotle’s perspective, a condition inflicting a

genius mind, but as a specific code of recognition, cognition, and perception that can

be used as a literary device. Cowan (4, 242) and Flatley (2, 64-75) identify in Burton’s

work a unique technique—“melancholizing”—in creative thinking.

Burton himself alludes to this intentional act to “melancholize” (I: 19) in explain-

ing “voluntary solitariness” as a cause of melancholy. For Burton, compared to the

potentially depressing activities of staying in bed or walking alone, melancholizing

can be an enjoyable activity, as in meditating “upon some delightsome and pleasant

Banu Helvacıoglu 171

Pamuk uses the technique of melancholizing not only as a creative endeavour to sep-

arate himself from the collective black mood of the city; he also employs it to produce

a spatially specific account of Istanbul to dissipate the sorrow and grief of the past,

only to be transformed in a timeless context under a different guise. By reiterating the

willful dimension of melancholizing, this essay aims to move beyond Pamuk’s dubi-

ous use of the term “European roots of melancholy” toward a specific psychologi-

cal/emotive condition, neither genius nor diseased, but reflective of one’s condition in

relation to historical, social, and universal human folly.

I n locating the cultural boundaries of melancholy and hüzün, however, we need to

attend to another conceptually fuzzy problem. Pamuk briefly mentions Claude Lévi-

Strauss’s work Tristes Tropiques, a dense text in which he narrates his uneasy relation-

ship with anthropology and his journey to São Paulo and indigenous communities in

Brazil in the 1950s, amid his memories of fascism, Judaism, and undated trips to

Calcutta and Delhi. With regard to the latter, Lévi-Strauss also offers observations about

Islamic culture. For this inquiry, it is particularly important to note Lévi-Strauss’s view

that for Islam it is “difficult to conceive of solitude. It sees life as being first and foremost

a communal affair, and a dead man is always inserted into the framework of a commu-

nity which has no participants” (400). Pamuk’s reference to hüzün in Islamic culture

does not corroborate this observation. Instead, in his only reference to Tristes Tropiques,

Pamuk initially notes that from the point of view of Western travellers there is “an affin-

ity between hüzün and another form of melancholy [. . .] tristesse” (89). They “both sug-

gest a communal feeling, an atmosphere, and a culture shared by millions” (90).

Pamuk does not elaborate on the connection between the two, but it can likely be

attributed to how the tragic transformation of indigenous communities under colonial

subject,” building “castles in the air,” “to go smiling to [oneself],” and using and act-

ing upon one’s imagination in “infinite” varieties (283). In his “Abstract of

Melancholy” he captures the intentionality of this act as follows:

When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things fore-known,

When I build Castles in the air,

Void of sorrow and void of fear,

Pleasing my self with phantasms sweet,

Methinks the time runs very fleet.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as Melancholy (I: 9)

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)172

rule (the “fast and ugly face of construction”) and the poverty that left its mark on São

Paolo’s landscape reflects the degradation of Istanbul after the decline of the Ottoman

Empire (Lévi-Strauss 96-97).11 The connection may well be in Pamuk’s own imagina-

tion. Notwithstanding the possibility of seeing one’s mind and soul reflected in some

remote corner of the world, there is yet another ambiguity. The communal dimensions

of hüzün and tristesse evade the metaphysical difference between rituals of death as

experienced in Istanbul and those of Bororo, an indigenous community in Brazil

where “a man is not an individual but a person” (234). According to Lévi-Strauss, the

death of a person in Bororo is an occasion to observe an intricate web of power rela-

tions between the “sociological universe of the village” and the “physical universe of

[. . .] celestial bodies, meteorological phenomena,” and the world of the spirits.

Considered from the individual point of view, “each death is the occasion for a per-

sonal arbitration between the physical universe and the society” (240).

Without noting metaphysical differences among indigenous communities in

Brazil, Pamuk maintains a vague distinction between the communal and the individual,

where the subtle differences in arbitrating one’s life and death in Istanbul are left to the

reader to decipher. Furthermore, in distinguishing between Istanbul’s hüzün and Lévi-

Strauss’s tristesse, Pamuk claims that “tristesse implies a guilt-ridden Westerner who

seeks to assuage his pain by refusing to let cliché and prejudice colour his impression.

Hüzün, on the other hand, is not a feeling that belongs to the outside observer” (92). In

the general context of Pamuk’s candid note on Western travellers as well as his detailed

descriptions of hüzün, this contrast between tristesse and hüzün implies the introspec-

tive nature of hüzün offered by a specific Istanbullu, who came to know his city partly

through the lens of Western travellers and European painters, poets, and writers, and

partly through incessantly walking the streets of Istanbul from a young age.

R egardless of the ambiguities and conceptual difficulties, the main point cutting

through Pamuk’s narration is the symbiotic relationship between his melancholy

and the gloomy, bleak mood of Istanbul, with its filthy streets, foul smell, and push-

ing and shoving as a daily routine: “When its melancholy begins to seep into me and

from me into it, I begin to think there is nothing I can do: like the city, I belong to the

living dead, I am a corpse that still breathes, a wretch condemned to walk the streets

and pavements that can only remind me of my own filth and my own defeat [. . .] The

darkest, most murderous and authentic strain of melancholy creeps in from streets

too distant to see, and I can almost smell it” (286).

In this relationship between the personal and the culturally specific melancholy/

hüzün in Istanbul, Pamuk is conspicuously quiet on death. He does not investigate the

Banu Helvacıoglu 173

reception of life and death in Islam, nor does he explore how Istanbullus respond to

the death drive in their own lives. Although he refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s construc-

tion of “the universal understanding of mankind” in terms of melancholy and death

(101-02), he notes that four melancholic writers—Tanpınar, Kemal, Şinasi, and

Koçu—“never consciously followed Poe’s logic” (102). The question then is, if not

death, what is the underlying current in hüzün as a cultural condition?

At one level, Pamuk traces the etymology of hüzün to the Arabic words hüzn and

hazen and contextualizes it at three levels. First, with reference to the Koranic use, he

notes the Prophet Muhammed’s grief at the death of his wife, Hatice, and of his uncle

Ebu Talip. It also means a feeling of “deep spiritual loss.” Second, to elaborate on this

spiritual loss, Pamuk refers to an unspecified Islamic philosophical tradition where

one experiences such loss when one invests too much of one’s being in worldly pleas-

ures and possessions. Third, he refers to Sufism as a distinct philosophical tradition,

in which hüzün denotes grief, emptiness, a sense of inadequacy, and spiritual anguish

resulting from a true believer’s impossible desire to be close to Allah. The underlying

current in a Sufi’s suffering is not death, but his lack of “apprehension of Allah.” It is

not clear how Pamuk makes the leap that these two Islamic traditions represent

Islamic culture in general. Yet, the anathema of his book is that “Islamic culture has

come to hold hüzün in high esteem” (81).

While reflecting on the enigmatic boundaries of the Islamic and European roots

of melancholy and hüzün, Pamuk notes the similarity between Ibn-Sina’s Fi’l Hüzün

and Burton’s Anatomy.12 He argues that “hüzün stems from the same black passion

[. . .] first conceived in Aristotle’s times (melan khole—black bile)” (82-83). In spite of

their “different cultural traditions,” Ibn-Sina and Burton both had an “encyclopedic

view of the black pain” and offered similar remedies (82). Notwithstanding this “com-

mon ground,” Pamuk returns to his brief inference that Burton’s conceptualization of

melancholy is a condition of solitude. This time, his argument is reminiscent of Lévi-

Strauss’s observation of the absence of solitude in Islam. Pamuk claims that “all clas-

sic Islamic thinkers” were preoccupied with cemaat, or the community of believers. In

particular, he notes El-Kindi’s analysis of hüzün as “a mystical state (engendered by

the frustration of our common aim to be at one with Allah) and as an illness.”

According to El-Kindi, the experience of hüzün is “at odds with the communal pur-

pose” (83). The enigmatic question, which remains unattended in Pamuk’s narration,

is how an illness that contradicts the Islamic understanding of community has come

to define the communal black mood in a predominantly Muslim city.

By amalgamating references to hüzün, Pamuk uses it as both a cultural concept and

as the defining feature of Istanbul’s essence. As a particularly Islamic cultural concept,

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)174

hüzün is inherent to the communal longing for Divine Oneness. At the same time,

Ibn-Sina’s depiction of it as the black bile is also connected to Islam. Pamuk insists on

the communal-understanding version, which ignores such personal events as the

Prophet Muhammed’s family losses. A systematic theological and philosophical

analysis of death and personal mourning in Islamic culture, which is seemingly absent

from the literature, could explore this issue.

When it comes to hüzün as both a cultural concept and the essence of Istanbul,

Pamuk intimates that hüzün conveys “failure,” “listlessness,” and “spiritual suffering”

(82) as much as it does “grief,” “ache” (13), “shameful poverty” (32), and neglect. He

explores the historical, psychological, and emotional underpinnings of hüzün as

Istanbul’s essence by using the city as a canvas and a black-and-white movie back-

drop. While being mindful of the problematic contextualization of melancholy/hüzün

as a cultural condition, we can finally turn to hüzün as the mood of the city.

Although Pamuk does not specifically engage in a psychoanalytical examination

of hüzün, he refers to a number of psychological conditions. At a personal/communal

level, posturing against creativity speaks in the feminine (maternal) voice of a

national alter-ego: the culture that has lost its strength and fallen into poverty in the

second half of the twentieth century cannot afford the European preoccupation with

art and aesthetics (323). Elsewhere, when Pamuk traces the footsteps of his deeply

rooted depression, he sees Ottoman architecture in Istanbul from the purview of “an

end of empire melancholy, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze

and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like [an] incurable disease; it is res-

ignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul” (38).

Pamuk narrates many scenes of deep-seated melancholy whose roots are difficult

to trace to a single cause such as European aesthetics or losses associated with the end

of the Ottoman Empire. Yet there is one emotive thread that runs throughout the

book: “The remains of a glorious past and civilization” inflict heartache. “The people

of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives among the ruins. Many Western writers and

travelers find this charming. But for the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents,

these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never

again dream of rising to the same heights of wealth, power and culture” (91).

Before elaborating on the “inward-looking soul” and “the erosion of will” as tell-

tale signs of submission in Istanbul’s hüzün, it is helpful to return to the question of

mourning. Although Pamuk does not refer to Freud’s distinction between the “normal

effects of mourning” in response to the “loss of a loved person, or to the loss of an

abstraction” and “a pathological disposition in melancholia” (Freud 243), his narration

does not spare the tragi-comic ramifications of how the decline of the Ottoman

Banu Helvacıoglu 175

Empire registered in Istanbul’s psyche: “their city falling into poverty, melancholy and

ruin—Istanbullus became an inward-looking, nationalist people [. . .] suspicious of

anything new, and most especially anything that smacks of foreignness. (Even if we

also covet it.) For the past hundred and fifty years, we have lived in timorous anticipa-

tion of catastrophes that will bring us fresh defeats and new ruins” (186).

Immersing his psyche into the psyche of the city, Pamuk narrates many morbid

incidents with the implication that they are part of the ordinary, such as anticipating

ship accidents and radio announcements during the Cold War warning of free-floating

mines at the mouth of the Bosphorus (180). He posits that watching ships and old

wooden mansions burning and people death-jumping off the Bosphorus bridge were

entertaining and pleasurable group activities. Pamuk makes sure to remind readers

that the voyeurism of fire-watching in Istanbul dates back to at least the nineteenth

century. “It was not just pashas, looters, thieves and children who ran to watch the old

Istanbul fires; Western travel writers felt compelled to observe and describe them,

too” (190). Further, Other Colours contains two essays on the 1999 earthquake in

Istanbul and the angst following (84-104). To reiterate the repressed fear of death in

the aftermath of the earthquake, he notes how he and one of his neighbours

researched the likelihood of their building falling onto the minaret of the nearby

mosque or the minaret falling onto their building (95).

From the defensive posture of the national alter-ego and paranoia to the present

angst of Istanbullus anticipating new catastrophes, Pamuk offers scenes from a

melancholic individual psyche that is deeply insecure and lives off death, destruction,

defeat, and despair. This particular context recalls Freud’s analysis of “an object-loss

withdrawn from consciousness” in a melancholic patient who “cannot consciously

perceive what he has lost,” and shows signs of confusion and the impoverishment of

the ego (246-48). Freud’s analysis assumes the existence of a core self, which, in

Pamuk’s narration of Islamic culture and Istanbul’s communal essence, is nowhere to

be found. Putting aside the layers of loss that remain in the city’s psyche, in Pamuk’s

work, I identify the constituting element of hüzün as the erosion of individual will:

“The hüzün of Istanbul suggests nothing of an individual standing against society; on

the contrary, it suggests an erosion of the will to stand against the values and mores

of the community, encourages us to be content with little, honoring the virtues of

harmony, uniformity, humility” (94).

At one level, Pamuk relies on the notion of Sufi resignation, which offers the

“choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat and poverty.” From this perspective,

“hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses, but [its] principal cause”

(93). This notion of resignation further underscores the argument that the most

Mosaic 46/2 (June 2013)176

pervasive element of Istanbul’s hüzün is the erosion of will: a paralyzing feeling that

obliterates the individual’s desire to even imagine a different present and future.

Individual resistance to submission and resignation is incorporated into a commu-

nally praised and honoured “cloak of melancholy that brings [to the lives of

Istanbullus] a contentment, an emotional depth and that almost looks like happiness”

(268). This outlook suggests that the ability to respond honestly to one’s surround-

ings is so deeply buried under layers of an accepted psyche that a true Istanbullu is

fated to become one with hüzün.

H ow can a creative soul survive in such a bleak communal existence? Pamuk’s

response is that “this world of ‘ours’ in which [. . .] all shared in a common iden-

tity, respecting humility, tradition, our elders, our forefathers, our history, our

legends—was not a world in which I could ‘be myself ’” (290). Of numerous possible

interpretations of Istanbul, there is an affinity between Burton’s technique of melan-

cholizing and Pamuk’s own remedies in creating a lively space for his imagination.

The artists of modern aesthetic tradition, from Baudelaire to Turkish authors at the

turn of the last century, from Melling, Nerval, and Gautier to Lévi-Strauss and

Pamuk, grappling with the phantasms of their own “Western travellers,” succumbed

to the condition of melancholy as a way of creating a world different than the one

ordinary mortals live in. Regarding Pamuk’s decision to become a writer, his mother

thought that the “child who did not know what sadness was [. . .] blackened his

future” (330-33).

Pamuk’s style of melancholizing simultaneously offers the possibility of yielding

to the submissive, self-deprecating melancholy/hüzün with that of enjoying Istanbul’s

sublime beauty and the childishly defiant pleasures of searching for an “undiscov-

ered” corner of the city. Because of the chance to experience its timeless moments of

joy, Istanbul, the ancient city, comes alive in Pamuk’s portrayal of hüzün as a repre-

sentation of both historical decline and ungrievable loss.

The enigmatic contextualization of “European” melancholy and Istanbul’s hüzün

is in part due to the conceptual ambiguities and unsubstantiated metaphysical claims

in Pamuk’s narration. The ambiguity at times seems intentional. The intersection in

Pamuk’s narration between the historical and the timeless, between the Istanbullu

and the imaginary Western traveller and between black mood and sweet melancholy,

is tailored such that the reader is left with life-affirming choices and a deep sigh by

which to remember death.

Banu Helvacıoglu 177

NOTES

1/ In terms of Pamuk’s memories being both historical and atemporal, I am referring to Benjamin’s analy-

sis of memory and consciousness as incompatible yet simultaneous processes. According to Benjamin,

both in Proust and Baudelaire, “the data of remembrance” is not historical data but that of prehistory

(Charles 141). In this particular reading, I rely on Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the present not

only as the moment and site of the actuality of the past, but also as a monadic structure of remembrance

that sets itself apart from historical time. For this interpretation, see Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy:

Destruction and Experience (Ed. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print).

2/ I situate melancholy as an aesthetic condition particularly, but not exclusively, within the context of

Baudelaire’s conception of modernity, art, the flâneur, and the solitary individual wandering in the city,

inspired by its horrible, bizarre, hysterical, and repellent elements. See Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and

Selected Writings; Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire; and Margery A. Evans’s Baudelaire and Intertextuality:

Poetry at Crossroads (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print). For melancholy in aesthetic production,

also see Thomas Mann’s On Myself and Other Princeton Lectures (Ed. James N. Bade. New York: P. Lang,

1996. Print) and Julia Kristeva on Nerval, Dostoevsky, and Duras in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia

(Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Print).

3/ In conceptualizing modernity as a historic condition, I follow a specific distinction of modernity not

only as a category of historic periodization and social experience, but also as an incomplete project that

articulates specific temporalities and invents innumerable presents within a given historical temporaliza-

tion. See Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1996. Print).

4/ In the English translation of Pamuk’s book, while the Turkish word hüzün is italicized, the word

Istanbullu is not. In order to be consistent with the quotations used, I follow the same inconsistency.

5/ See Nurdan Gürbilek’s “Dandies and Originals: Authenticity, Belatedness, and the Turkish Novel” (The

South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2/3 [2003]: 599-628. Print) and Meltem Ahıska’s “Occidentalism: The

Historical Fantasy of the Modern” (The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2/3 [2003]: 351-79. Print).

6/ See Jonathan Flatley on Moscow in the 1990s in “Moscow and Melancholia” (Social Text 19.1 [2001]: 75-

102. Print) and Anita Schorsch on mourning art in America in “Mourning Art: A Neoclassical Reflection

in America” (American Art Journal 8.1 [1976]: 5-15. Print).

7/ See also Other Colours 370.

8/ For the limitations of representing the totality of catastrophic mourning, see Marc Nichanian’s

“Catastrophic Mourning” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian.

Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 99-124. Print).

9/ See Pamuk’s “A Private Reading of André Gide’s Public Journal” in Social Research (70.3 [2003]: 1001-

14. Print).

10/ See Jennifer Radden’s The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

129-55. Print).

11/ On the absence of colonial rule in Turkey, see Other Colours (370).

12/ Ibn Sina (980-1037) is also known as Avicenna, whose Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in

the twelfth century. I am not sure what Pamuk has in mind when he refers to Aristotle’s times. According

to Kristeva, “Aristotle breaks new ground by removing melancholy from pathology [. . .] The melancholia

he evokes is not a philosopher’s disease but his very nature, his ethos” (7). For the odyssey of melancholia

from Aristotle’s times to the Middle Ages, see Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas: Word and the Phantasm in

Western Culture (Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1993. 16-28. Print).

Specifically for Ibn-Sina’s work within this history, see Radden 75-78.

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BANU HELVACIOGLU is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent

University, where she teaches modern political theory and aesthetics of politics with a strong

emphasis on continental philosophy. One of her research interests is melancholy in the urban,

Islamic context of Ankara and in minority literature.